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Chris Robinson has never built a boat or even sailed, and he admits that a tidal wave is unlikely to hit Silicon Valley. But in his Palo Alto backyard, Robinson has spent the past two years building a defense against one: a 22-foot-long, 10-foot-wide, 8.5-foot-high tsunami-proof capsule made of plywood and epoxy.

After watching coverage of the Fukushima disaster and a flood-devastated Japan, Robinson started working on an escape route. “No one is going to wear a jet pack on their back as they work in their office,” Robinson says, so he imagined a more buoyant solution—drawing inspiration from oil-derrick escape pods and a Canadian artist who constructs wooden spheres that hang in trees and double as hotel rooms.

The tsunami ball under construction. Mark Mahaney

The former Facebook and PayPal art director used Adobe Illustrator to sketch his tsunamiball plan (he asked some engineers for help calculating whether it would float). “Very early in the project it became about building this interesting object,” Robinson says. “I’m not a survivalist. I don’t even have life jackets.” He does, however, have an emotional connection to Fukushima—he met his wife there in 1991, when he lived in Japan. “Half the places we went on dates are gone,” he says. Robinson plans to finish the outer shell by May, then ocean-test the vessel if he can find a crane and truck big enough to haul it over to the Pacific. And if the sphere doesn’t sink, he’ll use Airbnb to rent the tsunamiball for tidal wave-safe overnights in Palo Alto.